by Catrin Fflur Huws

The Writer

Catrin Fflur Huws has written for Castaway Community Theatre since 2008 including their summer show Rain of Blood. Her monologue Last Night at the London Palladium was performed by Sharon Morgan at Dirty Gifted and Welsh in October.

Catrin was selected for the Sherman Cymru Spread the Word scheme for emerging writers in English language and the Sherman Cymru Gair Ar Led emerging writers scheme in Welsh language.

To Kill a Machine, her first full length play, was originally developed as a 30 minute play and was selected for a script-in-hand reading at Aberystwyth Arts Centre as part of the Spread the Word. Catrin is a lecturer in Law at Aberystwyth University.

She has written academic work on the significance of the mortgage in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (‘What is the Significance of the Mortgage in Love’s Labour’s Lost? Law and Humanities 5(2) 385-399) and has also published an article on the legal system as a Turing-compliant machine (‘Command Theory, Control and Computing: A Playwright’s Perspective on Alan Turing and the Law.’ Liverpool Law Review, 35 (1), 7-23), as well as presenting a paper at Newcastle University’s Performance and Prejudice symposium. She is currently working on a project on law and verbatim theatre, and recently organised a verbatim theatre workshop with Theatr Arad Goch based on the first case heard in Welsh and English in the High Court. Catrin draws on court cases as inspiration for her creative writing, and one line of the dialogue in To Kill A Machine does come from a real case.

“The thing about Alan Turing’s life, that stood out for me, were the parallels between his work and personal life . He was asking the question in his computer work, ‘can you tell the difference between a man and a woman?’ as a puzzle for computer science. Within his love life he was also saying, who you fall in love with does not distinguish in terms of social constructed ideas of gender. Your emotions and your feelings can’t distinguish in exactly the same way that, within the computer puzzle, the interrogator in the other room can’t distinguish between a man and a woman. Then Alan Turing went onto write about the question – can machines think?

The social system doesn’t accept people whose behaviour is not what society expects and society as a machine is something that is unable to think in terms of being able to say that’s not what the response we would have given it is nevertheless what we “think”. He also talks about if a person isn’t trying to deceive the interrogator the person could lie but the machine could not, the machine would always tell the truth. In a way Alan Turing’s downfall is because he is not able to deceive the system. His co-defendant at the trial was able to deceive the system by giving the court the answers they wanted to hear whereas Alan Turing sees everything as a genuine query of why would you lie so has no defences to, what he writes about in the abstract is reflected in the way he responds to interrogation.”